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Morning routines are everywhere. I love them. I love reading about what successful people do in the morning, and I love playing around with my own morning routine.

But this isn’t one of those routines. This isn’t a routine geared for productivity, although that is a likely side effect. In fact, it isn’t a routine at all.

Rather, this article is about 3 simple and easy practices for you to incorporate into your current morning routine. These practices will help you to optimize your circadian rhythm, which in turn is going to lead to improved sleep quality as well as improved health in general.

The practices are light, movement, and food.

Light

As soon as you wake up, you want to get some bright light. Currently, the sun comes up at about 5:30 am where I am, so this is easy. But in the winter months, the sun sometimes isn’t up until 7:30 am, and I know in some parts of the world, like my hometown of Calgary, the sun doesn’t come up until 9 am or later.

If the sun is up, get outside or at a very minimum open your curtains and sit near the window.

If the sun isn’t up yet, turn on some bright lights.

Another way to increase your light exposure in the morning is to not wear sunglasses on the way to work. Again, in winter this probably isn’t relevant, depending on when you leave for work, but during the summer months, you can get a lot of light exposure on the drive to work.

You want to aim for about 1000 lux. You can download the free app, MyLux, which will measure lux. And you ideally want to stay in this level of light all day if you really want to maximize your circadian rhythm. But that’s an article for another day.

For now, get some bright light exposure as soon as possible after you wake up, for as long as is practical.

Dr. Satchin Panda, a circadian expert, explains how this works:

“When you wake up, bright light is detected through the eyes’ blue light sensor, melanopsin, and when that happens, melanopsin tells the brain to stop producing the sleep hormone melatonin and start increasing production of the stress hormone cortisol, which will help you begin to feel alert and ready to start the day. Bright light in the morning also synchronizes your brain clock to the daytime so that your circadian rhythm and learning and memory will begin to rise and you’ll reach optimal productivity a few hours later.”

Movement

The next component is movement. Moving in the morning is a powerful way to optimize your circadian rhythm. If you think about how our ancestors would have lived, you’ll understand why. We have evolved to wake up and move. Our ancestors did the majority of their movement during the morning and in the late afternoon, doing their hunting when the majority of animals were active, and so our circadian rhythms are improved when we live in alignment with this.

This doesn't have to be time-consuming. It’s not a workout, it’s simply getting your body moving and your blood flowing. For me, this looks like 10 burpees while the kettle is boiling, and then if time permits, I will go for a 10–15 minute walk after I finish my coffee. I know this time is a luxury that a lot of people don’t have, but even waking up 10 minutes earlier means that you can squeeze this movement in. The benefits are well worth those 10 minutes less in bed.

If you can’t fit in a walk, even just doing 1 minute of exercise will have benefits. Jog in place, jump on a mini trampoline, do jumping jacks or push-ups or sit-ups. You can try out this 5-minute exercise routine or create your own.

It’s important to find something that is sustainable — something that you’ll do every day. Reduce the resistance as much as possible to reduce the likelihood of you skipping it.

Food

Now it’s time to eat something. Food is another powerful cue for our circadian rhythms and so eating in the morning is a great way to enhance your internal clock.

“Just like the first light of the morning resets our brain clock, the first bite of the morning resets all other organ clocks.” — Dr. Panda

This is going to go against what all the intermittent fasters out there are likely doing, but you can actually incorporate this into an intermittent fasting schedule.

You can still keep your feeding window of 10 or 8 or however many hours you usually eat for, but just shift the window forward a bit. Eating in the morning optimizes your circadian rhythm and also has a lot of health benefits as well. Again, this is an article for another time, but avoiding eating late into the evening will reap massive benefits.

“Eating late at night is by far the worst choice you can make, and it will totally defeat any benefits you achieved throughout the day. First, snacking late at night disrupts the digestive clock: you reignite your metabolism in your gut, liver, and throughout your body. In this sense, you are literally waking the body when it is meant to be slowing down, cooling down, and getting ready for sleep.” — Dr. Panda

This is known as time-restricted eating, or TRE, and it’s an incredibly powerful practice. Similar to intermittent fasting, you are compressing your meals into a shortened window of time, except that it has the aim of optimizing your internal clock by eating at the times our bodies are primed to eat.

So, if your feeding window is 8 hours, you could start eating at 9 am and finish eating at 5 pm. This will likely be hard initially if you are used to eating in the evening, but your body will quickly adjust and you’ll actually stop craving food at night.

Conclusion

Simply including the practices of light exposure, movement, and food into your morning routine can have massive benefits to both your sleep quality and your health in general. When you wake up, aim to get as much light exposure as you can, as soon as possible, get your body moving, and have something to eat.